Globalised growth calls for interdependence in areas like biodiversity

Biodiversity and its protection make aesthetic and even spiritual sense, helping humans locate themselves in the totality of life and nature. But in this materialistic world, what counts is economic sense. Sense comes to the starving man in the form of bread or, more prosaically, of funding to meet the cost of measures that eat into desperately needed immediate income, even as these measures are meant to enrich biodiversity.

The 11th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that ended in Hyderabad last week saw developed countries agree to double their resource flows to developing economies by 2015 to help halt loss of the planet's biodiversity. India has done well to play a role in achieving this end.

Resource mobilisation was an unfinished agenda at COP 10 at Nagoya, Japan, that had significant outcomes otherwise. The outcomes included adoption of targets to implement three goals of CBD — conservation, sustainable use and sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources — and also the Nagoya Protocol on access to genetic resources and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use. Implementation of these goals will gain traction with more resources.

The estimated spends are said to vary between $17 billion and $41 billion. Developed countries should view these spends as investments. The point is that countries are putting their future at risk when they allow rapid depletion of their natural capital to enhance production. This should be halted. A key decision at COP 11 was also to include new measures to factor biodiversity into environmental impact assessments for infrastructure and other development projects in marine and coastal areas. This is welcome. A methodological issue is that when the cost of loss of biodiversity or its mitigation are factored into a project's cost-benefit analysis, a value should be added on the benefit side as well, so as not to skew the social cost/benefit ratio. The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity seeks to supply such numbers.

India has done well to ratify the Nagoya protocol and earmark $50 million for building capacity in this area.